“If my mistress,” says the cook, “went to market herself, she would have to pay more for her provisions than I charge her; she is the gainer, and the profits I make do more good in my hands than in those of the dealers.”

“If Mademoiselle,” thought Gaubertin, “were to manage Les Aigues herself, she would never get thirty thousand francs a year out of it; the peasants, the dealers, the workmen would rob her of the rest.  It is much better that I should have it, and so enable her to live in peace.”

The Catholic religion, and it alone, is able to prevent these capitulations of conscience.  But, ever since 1789 religion has no influence on two thirds of the French people.  The peasants, whose minds are keen and whose poverty drives them to imitation, had reached, specially in the valley of Les Aigues, a frightful state of demoralization.  They went to mass on Sundays, but only at the outside of the church, where it was their custom to meet and transact business and make their weekly bargains.

We can now estimate the extent of the evil done by the careless indifference of the great singer to the management of her property.  Mademoiselle Laguerre betrayed, through mere selfishness, the interests of those who owned property, who are held in perpetual hatred by those who own none.  Since 1792 the land-owners of Paris have become of necessity a combined body.  If, alas, the feudal families, less numerous than the middle-class families, did not perceive the necessity of combining in 1400 under Louis XI., nor in 1600 under Richelieu, can we expect that in this nineteenth century of progress the middle classes will prove to be more permanently and solidly combined that the old nobility?  An oligarchy of a hundred thousand rich men presents all the dangers of a democracy with none of its advantages.  The principle of “every man for himself and for his own,” the selfishness of individual interests, will kill the oligarchical selfishness so necessary to the existence of modern society, and which England has practised with such success for the last three centuries.  Whatever may be said or done, land-owners will never understand the necessity of the sort of internal discipline which made the Church such an admirable model of government, until, too late, they find themselves in danger from one another.  The audacity with which communism, that living and acting logic of democracy, attacks society from the moral side, shows plainly that the Samson of to-day, grown prudent, is undermining the foundations of the cellar, instead of shaking the pillars of the hall.

CHAPTER VII

CERTAIN LOST SOCIAL SPECIES

The estate of Les Aigues could not do without a steward; for the general had no intention of renouncing his winter pleasures in Paris, where he owned a fine house in the rue Neuve-des-Mathurines.  He therefore looked about for a successor to Gaubertin; but it is very certain that his search was not as eager as that of Gaubertin himself, who was seeking for the right person to put in his way.